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The Death of the Family

Recently, I have been reflecting on the claim that communism means the death of the family. Before I became a parent I accepted this claim without much reflection, simply as a good theoretical point, because I wasn't involved in developing my own family (in the sense implied by the aphorism) and so it did not apply to me personally. Obviously I could understand, having been brought up in a family and socialized according to particular familial values, why this "death of a family" made sense––but once some of us are independent adults, as I have been for some time, it is easy to pretend that we are outside of the family and, socialized into unconsciously thinking of ourselves as individuals even though we consciously know this is a lie, have already murdered its influence.

Having a child with your partner, though, regardless of how traditional or untraditional your relationship with this partner may be, does bring the family directly and consciously back into your personal life. In an every day and practical sense you have to make choices "as a family" for the well-being of your child. You are treated by the state "as a family" for reasons of taxation, subsidies, daycare, medical concerns, travel. And since you brought this child into the world, and she is dependent on you in order to exist and because of this dependence grows to love you very quickly, you tend to close ranks and become, for all intents and purposes, a family unit. Suddenly this "death of the family" that communism necessarily must bring may appear somewhat threatening, or at least in contradiction to all of the good things parenting teaches you.

So yeah, in a significant sense, I love being a parent in a family unit. I love raising my daughter, caring for her, reading to her, putting her to bed, picking her up from daycare, and carting her around. I love that she loves me, and will hug me and babble "dadda" at me, and dance, and play about me. I love watching her grow every day and reveal something new that requires me to be more giving of my time and energy.

At the same time, though, I cannot help but be completely aware that the family unit in which I'm involved is not a transhistorical or even transcultural phenomenon. I am part of a family unit that is only possible at this period of time, in my particular social context. It is not the family unit understood as family prior to capitalism, it is not the family unit common to most third world contexts, it is not even the family unit shared by so many people in my city: poor working-class families experience a different reality, extremely wealthy bourgeois families experience a much more privileged reality, traditional "family values" types of my city, of all walks of life, throw in an added ideology that consists of significant gendered roles. Even still, I participate in a family life that is still a family life: along with my partner and my child, I am part of a qualified and quantified unit.

Vague attempts to escape the institution of the family are not, at this historical juncture, entirely useful. It doesn't make sense, at least in the opinion of my partner and myself, to reject the concept of the family by liquidating ourselves in some utopian and extended family. After all, we don't necessarily agree with the choices made by other left-wing activists, as they don't necessarily agree with our choices, and it is rather utopian to pretend otherwise. We all familied ourselves within a mode of production that has institutionalized the family––since birth is not yet socialized, we have brought children into particular circumstances that are not at all identical.

And yet, despite all this, the death of the family still makes sense as a communist demand. As much as my partner and I intend to raise our child according to our values, once she was born the weight of the family was reestablished. Grandparents, uncles and aunts, cousins are suddenly more interested in our day-to-day decisions. The social relations of the family, that I could unconsciously pretend did not exist until I had a child, were revalorized the moment my daughter was born… And such relations become the avenues in which traditional values, rightly or wrongly, are transmitted and reinforced. Sometimes these relations are experienced as a force of potential conservatization where, simply because you are being told how you were raised when you were a child, you face a constellation of traditional values regarding motherhood/fatherhood, daughters/sons, etc.

Hence, the institution of the family is one way in which bourgeois hegemony is realized as common sense. Unless you plan to take your child away from family altogether, or unless every member of your family is somehow and absurdly communist, you're going to encounter the problems of the family that needs to die. Moreover, because you're encountering this problem as a family unit, no matter how you see yourself, it will take its toll. And if you don't think it's a problem, and see yourself as somehow outside of this problem or not as a family unit, then you're a hippy idealist who thinks they can escape a structural problem without getting rid of the structure. I would even go so far as to say that the mainstream left's current obsession with "family friendly" and "family accessible" events is a conservatizing result of family values, a way in which we've sublimated the family so as to curb our militancy.

To proclaim the death of the family, then, is still a radical demand. Interestingly enough, one of the only instances in which anti-communist propaganda has honestly depicted communist ideology is in regards to the problematic of family values. Assuming (and perhaps rightly so) that the average citizen in the bourgeois state would be enamoured with family values, the anti-communist propagandist had no reason to distort communism's aims in this area: they want to do away with the family––isn't this terrible?

The promised death of one very popular articulation of the bourgeois family

The institution of the family is thus one (and very significant) way in which capitalism reproduces itself. Either through what the Italian Marxist-Feminists once called "reproductive labour" (a concept that had its limits, to be fair), or simply through the familial reproduction of values. All of this rightist talk of a return to the bedrock of the family is not only about a return to the conservative "family values" of the 1950s, treated as ahistorical, though it is also that. It is also about socializing people into thinking that family dependency is a replacement for state responsibility. That is, there is no need to centralize state power and socialize the means of production to take care of everyone if families act as proper families and, taking responsibility for the "private sphere", look after themselves. If you starve it is simply because your family has failed to be a proper family, and its individual members responsible individuals, and not because of the overall structure. And the conservative discourse surrounding the supposed absence of "strong male role models"––and thus the assumption of patriarchy and heteronormativity––is simply one, though popular, articulation of family values. Capitalism is elastic enough to incorporate queer families into this structure as well, just as it has incorporated the kind of family that would have been seen as abhorrent by the anti-communist propagandists of yesteryear.

Therefore, even though I cannot help but admit that I like being part of a family unit, I have to accept that communism ought to do away with this institution as a whole. Socialize reproduction, socialize familial relations, put into place a process that will demolish the private sphere… We may love being parents now but, just as we love so many things because they are necessarily part of the way we must live our lives, hopefully there will come a future time where the entire institution of private-sphere parents will become a thing of the past.

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Thanks, I relate to this (3 young children and a marxist) and do enjoy reading your family related posts. This type of family life does kind of make the rest bearable but I'm aware it's a condition or a feature of this type of isolation and socialization. It's an interesting topic for what could be.

Thanks! How old are your kids and what has been the most difficult aspects of family life, vis-a-vis your politics (not talking about the obvious difficulties of being a parent), that you've encountered?

This post resonates with me since I'm looking around with my partner for our first apartment together. We're both going to be in school for a long time, so children don't seem to be an option for awhile, but this has been lurking at the back of my mind. Both of us are Leftists and we've been struggling to find some way to live together that doesn't just replicate capitalist values and institutionalized gender roles. Needless to say, since you've already articulated it so well, a full break can't come until these social structures are abolished.

Yes, though it is still worth reflecting on our behaviour in these kinds of relationships: how to be equitable when it comes to house-work and child-care, how to resist conservatisation, etc. After all, even though the normative monogamous family structure are inherited from early capitalism, other non-monogamous structures, or just an overall failure to have a committed relationship, are part and parcel of contemporary capitalism (and probably more bourgeois in some sense) and not as a whole, as some like to pretend, harbingers of a new relationship order.

My understand of this phrase is a bit different. Perhaps the death of family refers to the fading away of the family unit with the socialisation of chores like cooking of food, washing clothes, quality childcare, entertainment, fitness etc. Once these are achieved an individual and his relationship towards others tend to change. It is terribly inefficient to have these petty-bourgeois little family units, why not just use the law of division of labour to get these done more efficiently ? Changing of behaviour is not just by will it is also supplemented by changing of the conditions.

Well, in my opinion, it will mean all those things but I don't see why it wouldn't also just cease to exist since it serves no greater transhistorical purpose. The family has already died countless times, and the one we have now, at the centers of capitalism, is not at all what the family was like, say two hundred years ago. In each and every case, the family has been connected to the particular class structure of the mode of production. So if the family is something that is contingent on a particular class arrangement (and exists to reinforce this arrangement) why would it still exist when that upon which it is contingent ceases to be? So it's not that it's just terribly inefficient (as it will be under socialism), it is just that it will be an anachronism under communism and, like the state, probably wither away.

Hence, I'm in complete agreement with your last sentence about how changing behaviour has to do, primarily, with social conditions. Social being determines social class, as Marx said (and as I've written on this blog at various points over and over), so I wasn't meaning to suggest that we could get rid of the family now, etc. In fact, I pointed out that this kind of anti-family familialism was utopian hippy nonsense. However, as communists who are also part of family units it is sometimes worth reflecting on our role in these units, just as we critically reflect on our role within the broader society.

I read it. And it really, really bothers me. Especially the point dissing, basically, family friendly events for the left. With my partner working evening shifts, if there is a an event I have no one to babysit, and I am banned from the event if my baby can't be there. Its not feminist to live in a society where women do the majority of the childcare (no matter what we want as a couple capitalism for us means that my male partner works all the time and I do most of the childcare) and then have events where children and babies are not allowed. This doesn't mean that you never have a militant protest. But it does mean that you are excluding working class people, and mainly working class women, by not having family friendly events. And in a society and a left that basically abandons you the moment you have a child and bans or makes you fell unwelcome from most spaces in society, the family is often the only thing you have left to survive. Also, like many working people I've never been an "independent adult" as I've had caregiving responsibilities of siblings and a parent: i've never been free of familial obligations, and the idea that one could be free. An extended family is a kind of commons that capitalism seeks to break up and privatize, and for most people its the close to "from each, to each" that they will probably experience, even given the patriarchy and fucked up shit that is reality for nuclear families today.

I think you have a serious misunderstanding about what I was arguing about "family friendly events". To assume that I was "dissing" them is a serious misreading and utterly violates the principle of charity. What I was questioning was a discourse surrounding "family friendly events"––meaning that events are considered *not* family friendly if the group in charge of these events does not have the funding or ability to provide professional childcare. I think events, barring militant protests, should not deny children and should be child inclusive, but I feel that a certain focus on it through the lens of the traditional family is a problem.

You are quite right about the structure of the extended family being broken up by capitalist relations, but I think the current family as is needs to also being broken up (much like free labour does, according to the analogy you're using, without going back to feudal relations). You are also right that women are usually the ones excluded from these events and should be there with their children (again, read what I'm saying about "family friendly"), but I also think we need to conceptualize a situation where women can go to events without their children because the men are doing the childcare––something that is foreclosed by a conservative workerist discourse, that is not proletarian, that conceptualizes men as the bread-winners. Again, something current family social relations preserves.

I am intrigued by how the Communist position on the abolition of the family translates into practice. It appears to me that the issue of the family is often treated with an attitude that "it will wither in the end", despite its potential for preserving and perpetuating reactionary ideology.

It would be interesting to see an article on what the positions of revolutionary movements towards the abolition of the family have been. Do you know of any relevant resources or information?